About me

Hello, I’m Fiona and I live near Ripponden, West Yorkshire in the UK, in the beautiful Pennines with my husband and rescue whippet Flo, who you my recognise from the gram (we lost Ruby also featured here in 2024). We’ve had dogs all our married life, all rescues.

I spend a good deal of time staring wistfully at our long reaching views down the wooded Ryburn Valley and across to Norland Moor. This place inspires me and informs my work.

Background

My background is varied and on the face of it, disparate, having worked for twenty years in the fast paced commercial world of printing, then a further twenty years as a floral designer. I now cherry pick all my loves and passions acquired along the way and exist as what can probably best be described as a multi media artist.

I transform botanicals into handmade paper and create delicate paper sculptures. Using unusual and interesting shapes and forms I create wall hanging pieces as well as botanical installations. I focus on the shape and form of materials and see beauty in the overlooked and unwanted and incorporate rusty and found objects.

Photographing my work is a huge passion and I sell prints of my work from time to time - all inspired by still life and the Dutch Masters.

My journey

I studied and had a successful career in the fast paced, pressurised corporate world of Commercial Printing and worked with some of the best design agencies as my clients. I developed a great eye for colour, thanks to their demanding and minute colour corrections; as well as a life-long love of textured paper and a fascination with letterpress printing.

During my busy career my garden was a place of sanctuary from my stressful & pressurised job - at the age of twenty four I was obsessed with everything gardening and have had a love of it ever since

After almost twenty years being employed I toyed with self employment, dithering between garden design and floristry. I opted for floristry so that my passion for the garden didn’t get diminished by becoming my job and so it was that I started my own floral design business - Firenza Floral Design (later Firenza Flowers) which thrived for another twenty years.

After a traumatic year of family bereavement combined with my busiest year by far, a further change was needed. either I embraced the success of the business and went much bigger or I scaled back - I chose the latter.

During this time I was very honoured to have my garden featured in The English Garden Magazine.

english garden magazine feature

I edited my offering to become much more ‘me’ and encouraged people who just loved my work to trust me and allow me to design to my own brief - unable to fully articulate what they would get until it was created. This brought years of joy doing my perfect commissions, but it was still all for someone else, so I went one step further and stopped taking on commissions, to give myself time to explore my own artistic style. I had lots of things I wanted to dabble in and didn’t (don’t!) know which direction I wanted to take so I had to allow myself the time to just experiment. Paper making, earth pigments, eco printing, making marks with rust, natural dyeing, weaving - all set against the backdrop of incorporating my garden, the plants, the earth - everything.

My ethos

In 2012 at the peak of my floral design business, I started to grow a few herbs and flowers to use in my work, which by then was entirely large weddings.

[For context, the vast majority of flowers sold in the UK are imported and back then choosing to use self-grown materials was both unusual and I’m afraid was pretty much laughed at by my most of my peers - they’ve actually told me since, even though they’ve since embraced it too!]

I started sourcing locally grown flowers from artisan growers, at a time when there were almost no small-scale cut flower growers in the UK. It was also around this time that I had my eyes opened to the fact that the florist ‘staple’ floral foam was in fact a single use plastic - each brick breaking down into millions of tiny toxic microplastics, to be inhaled dry by the user or released into the water system when wet.

An early adopter of foam-free installations I relished discovering new, foam free ways of working, ways to create the large pieces I’ve always made. It turns out I have a real knack for solving the problem of making that happen and for years I taught foam-free designs around the world. My work has been featured in coffee-table books as well as global magazines like Harpers Bazaar (UK & US), Elle Decoration and Vogue.

I remain a passionate advocate of working naturally and sustainably There are now many florists using locally grown flowers and foam free mechanics and it gives me great pleasure to see some of my ‘out there’ and often Heath Robinson techniques being embraced far and wide for large scale designs.

I’m taking my large scale masterclasses on the road 🚐, including many overseas dates so watch this space.

“ … focusing on lesser known flowers that have been grown in Britain for centuries”

The Times

Now

I still embrace the wonk of a stem I have grown myself, don’t touch floral foam and work with natural elements.

I indulge my passion for materials that others look past, choosing a lichen covered twig or skeleton leaf in preference to a pretty flower. I source everything from my garden or the wider landscape and continue to edit what I grow to suit my work.

I feel like the loop has been closed, I’ve pursued various pathways and now all my passions - paper, plants and growing - have merged and I spend my time finding ways to make pretty things from them.

What a joy and a privilege to be utterly absorbed in everything you love, I shall keep reinventing myself for many years to come.

Fiona x

I adore using the unusual & see beauty in the most unexpected things

… rusty, twisted metal; gnarled bark or dried out contorted blooms just speak to me somehow. The movement, texture and patina all work together to create a wonderful narrative.

inspiration